Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

Sectoral targets

Your newspaper (Entre Nous, 6-12 December) quoted me for saying that the reason why we are so bad at informing about what we are doing is that we don’t know what we are doing.

My supposed “confession” came during the European Parliament’s development committee on 26 November where there was a discussion on the lack of sectoral output targets. Sectoral output targets is jargon for indicators of how the Commission allocates its development aid between sectors (such as health, education and transport) in recipient countries.

The quote is perfectly correct and is not a joke. I have in fact said this several times before both the Parliament and the Ministers for Development. It may well be a slightly exaggerated statement, but the background is serious enough. The information system, our archives and the way we have in the past categorised projects are so inadequate that we are not able to produce global figures on the sectoral distribution on health, education, environment, gender, transport, etc. Changing this is a crucial part of current external relations reform.

A harmonised Common Relex Information System (CRIS) will be in place by mid 2002. By early 2003, this system will provide comprehensive data to member states, the European Parliament and to the development assistance committee of the OECD. But the task of entering not only new projects but also the old ones in the pipeline of implementation will demand a lot of work. Eventually, the CRIS systems will give us a solid basis on which we can engage in discussions on how we allocate EU aid.